The dream

At the beginning of the Seventies, I began to give French and Italian lessons to small groups of students in private schools – International School of Languages, Holmes Language School, Berlitz Language school in Melbourne. I would have liked to have had a deeper, more academic knowledge of these languages but what I did have was, in any case, more than adequate for my courses.

A few years later, with some financial help from a friend, and sticking to my principle, if other people can be successful why shouldn’t I be ?, I opened a language school: European School of Languages, in the centre of the town where I was living. I would never have expected it to be such an amazing success; it was incredible. In the space of a few years about twenty-five part-time mother-tongue teachers were teaching at the European School of Languages and all the classrooms were constantly in use. Fantastic!

But then, just when everything was going so unbelievably well, while I was writing something on the blackboard one day, I suddenly collapsed onto the floor, unconscious. Shocked and alarmed, some of my students took me straight to the hospital of South Melbourne. I have no idea what was done to me there, all I know was that I came round after a few hours. What was wrong? No one knew. I had simply passed out. They asked me if it had ever happened before and I told them that yes, there had been another time. The same thing had occurred in France many years previously.

My doctor, Joan Fraser, who was a friend of mine, told me I had to have some tests, so I went to a clinic where a whole range of tests was carried out in a single day, but even then nothing specific was diagnosed. However, something mysterious did show up in my blood, necessitating even more tests, and I spent about a fortnight going back and forth to the clinic. In the end it transpired that I had thalassemia or rather, Cooley’s anemia. However, it was not certain whether it was the severe or the mild type. If it were the former, a case of severe thalassemia, I would not have long to live. Great!

I remember that one afternoon, on my way to the doctor’s, I stopped off at a shop selling continental products and bought a whole Camembert and a bottle of Beaujolais. I only took a bite of one and a sip of the other before throwing them, for some reason, into a rubbish bin. Then I got in the car and shot off, heedless of danger. The idea of death electrified me, made me do bizarre, absurd things.

I worried incessantly. The more I thought about what was happening, the harder it was to accept. This was fate mocking me, playing cruel tricks on me. What a joke! The unexpected was always lying in wait for you. I had worked so hard to achieve such small satisfactions, a certain fulfillment, and now? I still wanted to do so many things, above all, I wanted to write. Although I felt as if I had been alive for a long time, in some ways life seemed to me to have only just begun. And now what? I kept asking myself this question. I was angry in those days, so very angry.

Eventually they stopped taking blood from me and one evening, about a month after my collapse, my doctor told me that I only had a mild form of thalassemia. I just had to make sure I never had children with a woman who had the same blood disease. “Thank goodness for that!”, I exclaimed, hugely relieved.

Soon things returned to normal. I threw myself into my work with even more enthusiasm and directed the school for several years. I really enjoyed the work, even though it was hard and could be tricky. Hard because it took up all my time, my whole life in fact; tricky because, although the dominant culture was Australian, I also had to be aware of the different backgrounds of the teachers, none of whom ever caused me any problems at all, however. My friends and acquaintances had nothing but respect for the school, were full of admiration and approval .

The European School of Languages was a social, cultural and intellectual gym for me, a paradise of languages and international traditions. I learnt a tremendous amount, not only from the teachers who worked there but also from the students who attended the classes. I owe a great deal to this experience, to this dream which the place where I had ended up enabled me to fulfil.

Then towards the end of the Seventies, although the job was interesting, lucrative, everything you could want, I realized that it was taking up all my time, turning me into a slave and a miser and that I had had enough. So I decided to sell the school and leave Australia.

Back on the Old Continent, thanks to the money I had earned at the European School of Languages, and my continuing enthusiasm for knowledge in general and for art, languages and philosophy in particular, I was able to devote myself for a few years solely to study, attending, as and when I wanted, conferences, conventions, seminars and courses in various schools and universities.

In Denmark, besides studying Danish, I taught French and Spanish at the H-O-F (Hovedstadens Oplysnings Forbund) Undervisning di Copenhagen. I was fascinated by these Viking people who would turn up for lessons with their clothes covered in snow and take their places quietly and gracefully. Their behaviour disturbed me because I was unable to connect their present sophistication with the brutal, murderous Vikings that I had often seen in films and on television. They were very attentive in class and scrupulous about never missing a lesson. They spoke several languages and were always ready for a laugh. What unique, extraordinary people the Danes are !

Things changed definitively towards the middle of the Eighties when I went to visit an Italo-Australian friend who had moved to the Biellese area of Italy with his family. While I was staying with him I heard about the devaluation of the Australian dollar. From one thousand six hundred and fifty lire it had fallen to a thousand. In this way I lost almost half my money, my savings. Immediately I phoned my lawyer and friend, Denis Dalton, to whom I had entrusted my small fortune before leaving Melbourne. Denis had been trying to contact me to tell me about the awful economic situation in Australia but hadn’t been able to find me ( and how could he if I had no fixed address and not even a phone?). He told me how sorry he was, and that I had to decide as soon as possible what I wanted to do with the rest of my savings: invest them in a small property in Australia or have them sent out to me, because the dollar was going to fall again. I had the rest of the money sent to me in Biella.

Tony and Mary, the friends I was staying with, suggested that I should stay with them for a while before moving on and try giving English lessons to pass the time. That’s what I did and I discovered that I could do what I had l

ong been wanting to do: devote the mornings to writing and the afternoons to teaching. And so I settled in Biella.